Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

186 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
mals, but a disbelief in the scientific knowledge which vivisection is held to
provide.” The facts contradict the latter statement, for Shaw invariably insisted
that opposition to vivisection should be divorced from the question
of whether any useful knowledge is gained in the process; the humane
considerations simply outweighed any knowledge that might be acquired
(Shaw on Vivisection 55). Closer to the truth is the more moderate assertion
of some of Shaw’s scientific friends that he “had a hopelessly unscientific
mind” (Pearson 234). He did not think like most scientists, and
the difference made communication difficult or impossible. Yet as Thomas
Postlewait and Desmond J. McRory have made clear, he always insisted on
the importance of science and was opposed only to scientific arrogance,
scientific credulity, and the treatment of scientists as infallible priests with
direct access to the mind of God. He thought of himself as having a scientific
disposition and insisted that his background “made it impossible for
me to believe anything until I could conceive it as a scientific hypothesis”
(Pref. Methuselah 5:338). He meant that he could not believe anything
that was inconsistent with the facts and with reason, not that he subscribed
to the fashionable scientific worldview. In spite of the marked differences
between his way of seeing the world and that of most scientists, there is a
crucial similarity which is at the core of his insistence that his was a “scientific”
religion. He and the scientists conceive the universe as operating according
to a single set of predictable, comprehensible rules. Such an assumption
is necessary for the enterprise of science. The difference is that
for Shaw those rules are in part teleological, and the scientists cannot
imagine them as anything other than strictly mechanistic. He rejected the
scientific dogma that everything in the universe can be explained in
mechanistic terms because it ignores the plain facts of consciousness and
will. In that sense he thought himself more scientific than the scientists:
they, he thought, were blinded by their total faith in the materialistic
dogma whereas he was acknowledging the facts. That is why he claimed
that now “Religion is Science, and Science is Witchcraft” (“Science and
Common Sense” 196). Science is bent on denying truths that are central to
religion and obvious to common sense. Traditional religion, unfortunately,
ignores truths central to science. Refusing to choose between the two, he
said that we must have a religious science and a scientific religion (Everybody’s
Political What’s What? 363). All questions are scientific questions
(Everybody’s Political What’s What? 203) and “all truths . . . are divinely
inspired” (Black Girl 59). Scientists claim to be open-minded and skeptical,